STIGUI
V-272387CAT II — Medium severitySV-272387r1123881_rule

The two files generated by the BIND 9.x server dnssec-keygen program must be group owned by the server administrator account or deleted once they have been copied to the key file in the name server.

Rule version BIND-9X-001300 · STIG v3 · 2026-08-24

Discussion

To enable zone transfer (requests and responses) through authenticated messages, it is necessary to generate a key for every pair of name servers. The key also can be used for securing other transactions such as dynamic updates, DNS queries, and responses. The binary key string that is generated by most key generation utilities used with DNSSEC is Base64 encoded. A TSIG is a string used to generate the message authentication hash stored in a TSIG RR and used to authenticate an entire DNS message.

Check

With the assistance of the DNS administrator, identify all dnssec-keygen key files that reside on the BIND 9.x server.

An example dnssec-keygen key file will look like the following:

Kns1.example.com_ns2.example.com.+161+28823.key OR Kns1.example.com_ns2.example.com.+161+28823.private

For each key file identified, verify that the key file is owned by "named":

# ls -al -rw-r-----. 1 named named 77 Jul 1 15:00 Kns1.example.com_ns2.example.com+161+28823.key

If the key files are not owned by named, this is a finding.

Fix

Change the group ownership of the keys to the root group.

# chgrp named:named <key_file>.

Identifiers

Group ID
V-272387
Group title
SRG-APP-000516-DNS-000086
Rule ID
SV-272387r1123881_rule
Check ID
C-76437r1123879_chk
Fix ID
F-76344r1123880_fix